Impact Lab – Page 334 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Archer’s Maker eVTOL performs first hover flight

December 29, 2021

Archer Aviation’s electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) demonstrator Maker has completed its first hover flight, marking the company’s first full and complete systems validation.

“The past six months have been an incredible journey, from unveiling Maker to watching it take its first flight,” said Brett Adcock, Archer co-founder and co-CEO. “It’s been humbling to build a leading eVTOL company and educate the public on clean transportation alternatives.”

Archer’s Maker demonstrator is an autonomous two-seater eVTOL vehicle that has been certified for flight testing by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The next step is to test Maker’s capabilities of forward flying.

AI

DeepMind’s New AI With a Memory Outperforms Algorithms 25 Times Its Size

December 28, 2021

By Edd Gent – Dec 20, 202131,578

Bigger is better—or at least that’s been the attitude of those designing AI language models in recent years. But now DeepMind is questioning thisrationale, and says giving an AI a memory can help it compete with models 25 times its size.

When OpenAI released its GPT-3 model last June, it rewrote the rulebook for language AIs. The lab’s researchers showed that simply scaling up the size of a neural network and the data it was trained on could significantly boost performance on a wide variety of language tasks.

Since then, a host of other tech companies have jumped on the bandwagon, developing their own large language models and achieving similar boosts in performance. But despite the successes, concerns have been raised about the approach, most notably by former Google researcher Timnit Gebru.

In the paper that led to her being forced out of the company, Gebru and colleagues highlighted that the sheer size of these models and their datasets makes them even more inscrutable than your average neural network, which are already known for being black boxes. This is likely to make detecting and mitigating bias in these models even harder.

Augmented Reality

New haptic device communicates emotion with nearly 80% accuracy of human touch

December 28, 2021

by Amy Blumenthal

With the spread of the omicron variant, not everyone can or is eager to travel for the winter break. But what if virtual touch could bring you assurance that you were not alone?

At the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, computer scientist and roboticist Heather Culbertson has been exploring various methods to simulate touch. As part of a new study, Culbertson a senior author on this study, along with researchers at Stanford, her alma mater, wanted to see if two companions (platonic or romantic), could communicate and express care and emotion remotely. People perceive a partner’s true intentions through in-person touch an estimated 57 percent of the time. When interacting with a device that simulated human touch, respondents were able to discern the touch’s intention 45 percent of the time. Thus, devices in this study appear to perform with approximately 79 percent accuracy of perceived human touch.

brain hacking

Scientists taught a petri dish of brain cells to play pong faster than an AI

December 28, 2021

By Hope Corrigan

Move over Alder Lake, this is a new kind of hybrid chip.

As a lover of tough single player games, I’m quite accustomed to getting my butt handed to me by AI, and usually not even a real one. I also happen to be the owner of a full sized human brain. Though it’s not without its problems, the human brain’s ability to learn and change is usually why I eventually overcome those difficult in-game challenges.

So when I read about a few human brain cells in a petri dish that are already performing much better at a videogame than AI can, it’s concerning to me and my gaming future. New Scientist reports that a team in Australia has been growing these small puddles of brain and now one has learnt to play Pong, in fairly impressive time.

Cortical labs is a company working on integrating biological neurons with your more traditional silicon based computing hardware. They grow brain cells on microelectronic arrays, so the cells can be stimulated. These hybrid chips are said to be able to learn and restructure themselves to get past problems, like stopping a sneaky ball that wants in your goal.

3D Printer

World’s First 3D-Printed House Made Of Local Raw Earth – And it Closes the Roof With a Dome

December 27, 2021

By Andy Corbley

Inspired by the potter wasp, an Italian architecture firm has used 3D printing to make the domed, beehive-like structure of a house out of zero-emissions clay in the hope of showing what heights of sustainability can be reached with the technology.

Like the industrious wasps, the houses are made using the clay from wherever they are being built, which also means if they have to be knocked down, the only waste is the plumbing, gas, and electrical components.

Futurati Podcast, Science & Technology News

Futurati Podcast With Brad Templeton

December 27, 2021

View on Youtube

Listen on the Futurati Podcast website

Brad Templeton is chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is one of the founding computing faculty of Singularity University, and thinks about autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, privacy, and digital rights, among many other things.

quantum computing

Quantum computing: Forget about qubits, here come qutrits

December 29, 2021

Rigetti unveils 80-qubit processor quantum computer consisting of two 40-qubit computers, and experiments with ‘third state’ in quantum processors.

By Liam Tung

US quantum computer outfit Rigetti Computing has announced the Aspen-M, an 80-qubit processor quantum computer that consists of two connected 40-qubit chips.

The Aspen-M, available in a private beta, is the culmination of Rigetti’s particular take on large-scale quantum computers.

The firm is pursuing multi-chip quantum processors and announced plans earlier this year to offer it to customers through its Quantum Cloud Services platform.

Instead of scaling up a single quantum processor, it’s been linking smaller chips to create a modular processor with a larger number of qubits – the quantum version of bits in classical computers, characterized by 1s and 0s, which can achieve superposition where a bit can be both 1 and 0 or any combination inbetween those states.

Green Friendly

OF HEMP’S MANY USES, ONE OF THE MOST PROMISING COULD BE IN CONSTRUCTION

December 26, 2021

Although not a direct replacement for concrete, hempcrete has many benefits as a building material.

By Nate Berg

It has become almost a cliché to discuss the benefits of hemp, the supposed wonder plant with almost endless uses— from woven fibers to edible seeds to bioplastics. “Of course, hemp is that magic crop that does everything,” says Nicholas Carter, an environmental researcher who, along with Tushar Mehta, a Toronto-based doctor, runs the website Plant Based Data. His work involves reading through scientific papers and studies and summarizing the most important work supporting plants as a source of food and other important uses. Given the hype, Carter wondered just how much power hemp really had. “I wanted to see the research out there on it, to see what’s actually real, what’s actually backed by evidence,” he says.

Magic? Not exactly. But Carter came away from his attempted debunking a hemp believer. And one of the most promising of its many uses, he found, is its application as a building material known as hempcrete.

Like its namesake concrete, hempcrete is a material mixed with a binder that hardens it into a solid in the form of blocks and panels. Made from the dried woody core of hemp stalks and a lime-based binder, hempcrete can be cast just like concrete. But unlike concrete and its binding cement, which accounts for about 8% of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions annually, hempcrete actually sequesters CO₂. According to a recent study, hempcrete can sequester 307 kilograms of CO₂ per cubic meter (19 pounds per cubic foot), roughly the equivalent of the annual carbon emissions of three refrigerators.

Electric Vehicles

FedEx will soon start making deliveries using electric vans from GM

December 26, 2021

FedEx’s new electric delivery vans from GM’s BrightDrop.

By Tim Levin

FedEx received the first electric delivery vans from GM’s BrightDrop.
The EV600 goes 250 miles on a charge and has 600 cubic feet of cargo space.
FedEx has ordered 500 of the vehicles, which will start making deliveries soon.

FedEx received the first electric delivery vans from BrightDrop, a new electric logistics and delivery business out of General Motors. It’s a major milestone in both giants’ efforts to electrify their businesses.

FedEx took delivery of five BrightDrop EV600 vehicles at a FedEx Express facility in Inglewood, California, where they’ll be housed and operated. The vans are the first of 500 FedEx has ordered from the company.

Robots

A new micro aerial robot based on dielectric elastomer actuators

December 26, 2021

A 0.16 g microscale robot that is powered by a muscle-like soft actuator.

by Ingrid Fadelli

Micro-sized robots could have countless valuable applications, for instance, assisting humans during search-and-rescue missions, conducting precise surgical procedures, and agricultural interventions. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently created a tiny, flying robot based on a class of artificial muscles known as dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs).

This new robot, presented in a paper published in Wiley’s Advanced Materials journal, significantly outperformed many DEA-based micro-systems developed in the past. Most notably, the robot can operate at low voltages and has high endurance despite its miniature size.

“Our group has a long-term vision of creating a swarm of insect-like robots that can perform complex tasks such as assisted pollination and collective search-and-rescue,” Kevin Chen, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “Since three years ago, we have been working on developing aerial robots that are driven by muscle-like soft actuators.”

In their previous research, Chen and his colleagues presented several micro robots that could fly remarkably well, performing acrobatic movements in the air and quickly recovering after colliding with other objects. Despite these promising results, the soft actuators underpinning these systems required a high driving voltage of 2 kV, which prevented the robots from operating without an external power supply.

“To fly without wires, the soft actuator needs to operate at a lower voltage,” Chen explained. “Therefore, the main goal of our recent study was to reduce the operating voltage of muscle-like DEAs.”

Virtual Reality

Neuroscientists are using virtual reality to unlock a whole new world of brain research

December 24, 2021

A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany is using virtual reality to help us shed some light on one of the world’s greatest mysteries: emotions and our human brains.

For years, researchers have struggled to figure out how human brains process complex emotions. This is because replicating real human emotions within the controlled environment of a laboratory, a necessity for standardizing several variables is extremely difficult. However, the aforementioned team of scientists has circumvented this issue as best they could in a revolutionary way using virtual reality.

The team conducted a study to monitor the neural activity of emotionally charged humans by using the cutting-edge technology of virtual reality. The participants in the study put on VR glasses that made them feel as though they were in the cars of a rollercoaster ride. On this ride, they go through many exhilarating highs and lows. Their journey starts off as a steady roll through picturesque mountain landscapes, then suddenly they are frantically dashing through a raging fire, and lastly, after a tense moment of teetering on the edge, they fall into the depths of an abyss.

Cancer

Digital twins for cancer patients could be ‘paradigm shift’ for predictive oncology

December 24, 2021

A proposed framework for Cancer Patient Digital Twins (CPDTs) — virtual representations of cancer patients using real-time data — would combine high performance computing modeling and simulation, model inference and clinical data to make treatment predictions and individualized health care decisions for cancer patients.

by Jeremy Thomas

A multi-institutional team, including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) contributor, has proposed a framework for digital twin models of cancer patients that researchers say would create a “paradigm shift” for predictive oncology.

Published online in Nature Medicine on Nov. 25, the proposed framework for Cancer Patient Digital Twins (CPDTs)—virtual representations of cancer patients using real-time data—would combine high performance computing modeling and simulation, model inference and clinical data to make treatment predictions and individualized health care decisions for cancer patients. When fully realized, CDPTs would reflect a patient’s molecular, physiological and lifestyle characteristics as they evolve over time and across different treatments, and help “usher in a new age in medicine” by increasing the probability of optimal care, the authors concluded.

“CPDTs are a grand challenge problem in this growing convergence of high performance computing and oncology,” said contributor Amy Gryshuk, who serves as a lead in LLNL’s Strategic Science Engagements Office. “They have a tremendous potential to advance predictive medicine, but to fulfill that promise we will need to integrate multiscale and multimodal data to then build and test dynamic models at scale.”